Ohioville cancer survivor takes flight

Sunday

OHIOVILLE — The images on the chest X-ray were startling: A cancerous mass, the size of her heart, was pushing against 16-year-old Lauren Dawida’s heart, displacing it slightly.

After months of illness and fatigue, the diagnosis was Hodgkin lymphoma. Smaller masses were discovered on her neck and clavicle.

“Being told what is actually wrong with you is scary,” Dawida, now 18, a 2013 Western Beaver High School graduate, said. “Not knowing is scary, too, but knowing is definitely worse.”

Heart prevailed. Conviction won the wrestling match with catastrophe, and Dawida expects to provide another shocking image this week. She intends to take her first solo plane flight at the Beaver County Airport. She has been doing touch-and-go exercises on the runway in preparation.

“I learned I’m a strong person ... I learned if I can (beat cancer), I can do anything.”

Dawida, whose cancer is in remission, is being rewarded this weekend by the Courage for Life Foundation, launched in memory of 2008 Freedom Area graduate John Challis. The foundation honors high school athletes battling traumatic disease with the same spirit as Challis, who, after his cancer diagnosis, played football and baseball and inspired people across the country before his death in August 2008.

CFL will provide Dawida and her family — parents Susan and Joe, and brother Joey — with a Pittsburgh weekend that includes limousine service, food, hotel rooms and special accommodations at today’s game between the Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens. The game was Dawida’s choice.

“I’m a Pittsburgh fan,” she said, including the Penguins and Pirates in the statement. “But I’ve never been to a Steelers game.”

Dawida, an Ohioville resident, was a competitive gymnast for eight years before quitting during her sophomore year.

“She told us she didn’t enjoy it anymore,” Susan Dawida said. “We didn’t know she was having problems with fatigue and shortness of breath.”

“I was doing volleyball, gymnastics and school,” Lauren Dawida said. “I thought it was because I was trying to do too much.”

The symptoms persisted. Susan Dawida estimated her daughter attended only 25 days through the first five months of her sophomore year.

“She did her work at home, but she was sleeping most of the time.”

Susan Dawida said her daughter was diagnosed with anemia, then pneumonia. But her conditioned worsened. At UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Lauren Dawida moved through three departments without drawing a diagnosis, according to her mother. Finally, a doctor asked if Lauren ever complained of any other ailments.

“I told him she gets itchy,” Susan Dawida said.

The doctor recognized itching as a symptom of Hodgkin lymphoma — a cancer of the lymphatic system — and ordered the chest X-ray. At 16, she was diagnosed with cancer.

“It was so scary to see and hear that,” Susan Dawida said. “It stops you in your tracks.”

But Susan Dawida saw something else as her daughter persisted through two months of chemotherapy while maintaining her Western Beaver courses.

“I’m amazed to this day that she stayed so strong through the whole battle. I think some of it came from her gymnastics career,” she said. “When you get up on that beam in front of 1,000 people, you have to focus on the goal and nothing else.”

Lauren Dawida — in an answer few gymnasts will echo — said beam, the event most likely to provide falling and failure, was her favorite.

“This happens to a lot of people. I did what I had to do.”

Despite her yearlong battle, she graduated on time and has moved on to the Community College of Beaver County, where she is studying to be an air-traffic controller. Learning to fly is part of the curriculum.

Flying is also part of the family. Lauren Dawida said she has an uncle who is a pilot and three cousins who work as air-traffic controllers. She estimates she has been in the air 16 times since enrolling in August.

Susan Dawida says Lauren’s oncologist says Lauren “is in a good place,” and Lauren hopes her example persists longer than the disease.

Her advice to others who may be battling: “If there is an obstacle in front of you, treat it like a hurdle on the track. Jump over it. You can do anything.”

“Being told what is actually wrong with you is scary,” Lauren Dawida, now 18, a 2013 Western Beaver High School graduate, said. “Not knowing is scary, too, but knowing is definitely worse.”

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